We are persuaded that the position taken by Professor Law, and other similar-minded veterinary surgeons, is the only safe one. The disease can be stamped out now with comparatively small loss. If trifled with, and tolerated, it cannot but result in a great national calamity. * * * * * SPAIN A FIELD FOR MACHINERY AND PATENTS. From a too lengthy communication to admit in full to our columns, a resident of Madrid communicates to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN some facts relative to the fertility of the soil of Spain, her necessity for improved agricultural and other implements, and closes with the assertion that it is a good field withal for patents. We cull from the letter as follows: I have lived, says the writer, for a number of years in this beautiful country, so little understood by foreigners, so little appreciated by its own inhabitants. The Spain of romance, poetry, and song, is the garden as well as the California of Europe. But it stands in great need of the health-giving touch of the North American enterprise. We have here the same mineral treasures, the same unrivaled advantages of climate, that made Spain once the industrial and commercial emporium of the world. But Spain is awakening. She is endeavoring to shake off her lethargy. The late Exhibition of Paris has proved this; and those who are familiar with the past history and present condition of Spain have been astonished at the result of this effort. A new era has commenced for the country, and it is everywhere evident that a strong current of enterprise and industry has set in. But it is with nations, as with individuals, when they have remained long in complete inaction, brain and muscles are torpid and cannot at first obey the will. Spain needs the assistance of other nations hardened and inured to toil. The plows now used to till the land are precisely such as were those left by the Moors in the unfinished furrow, when with tears and sighs they bade farewell to their broad fields, their mosques and palaces, whose ideal architecture is still the wonder of the world, to go forth as outcasts and exiles in obedience to the cruel edict that drove them away to the deserts of Africa. I doubt whether there is an American plow in Spain, much less a steam plow. Sowing and reaping machines are here unknown, and grain is tread out by oxen and mules just as it was in Scripture times, and cleaned by women, who toss it in the air to scatter the chaff. Everything is primitive and Oriental here as yet.